


Providence

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Should Never Have Existed [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dragon Age Quest: The Wrath of Heaven, Enemies to Friends, F/F, F/M, Injury, M/M, Magic, Magic-Users, Nightmares, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), The Fade, Weird Plot Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-24 09:43:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13808592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: 'It was only by divine providence that I arrived when I did'. This is what magister Alexius said to Fiona, confused and ensnared as she was by his time-travelling scheme. He did not truly mean that, of course - but now, these words are to twist themselves into a completely new sense. For Alexius' attempt to remove Herald Trevelyan from the picture has gone horribly awry, and now he is the one who wields the glowing magical Mark and has to join the Inquisition in its fight against his one-time master. Which he does not find too objectable, now that he thinks of it. So long as he is allowed to keep caring for his son, it may even be for the best that he is cleaning up the Venatori's mess. It certainly feels more right than serving them. And perhaps it *is* right. Perhaps - for fear of cringing - it *is* providence.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Inquisition's Magister](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13482975) by [VirgilCanWrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VirgilCanWrite/pseuds/VirgilCanWrite). 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with an illustration in Chapter 4!

So there they were. Standing face to face in a brightly lit throne room, with the stretch of the carpet between them darkened by their own stark shadows like a narrow yet breathtakingly deep ravine. One that he had to leap over - now or never.  
  
All pretenses had been dropped, all inane 'negotiations' had wound off into nothing, all false colours had been stripped - thus revealing his true face, the leer of a predator with his eyes set on the mark and his body tense before a pounce. A deadly strike - across the fathomless ravine.  
  
He did not find much pleasure in the role. Or at least, a small part of him did not - a weak, flickering wisp at the back of his mind; a remnant from another time. When he had been the opposite of a predator. A teacher. A guardian. A friend.  
  
But now, those words were empty. Meaningless. Nothing but a distraction from the mission at hand. Just like the face of his apprentice, hovering somewhere behind his mark's back, eyes huge with shock and desperation.  
  
'You can't really be doing this!' a muffled voice called out, through the mounting crackle of his own magic. 'The Alexius I know would never…'  
  
He felt his lips curl even further upwards - no doubt increasing his likeness to a feral hunter.  
  
'The Alexius you know is long gone, Dorian,' he hissed, not really intending to be heard. 'Ripped apart by darkspawn. Swallowed by the Blight'.  
  
A flick of his wrist - and, with the crackle growing louder than ever before and sparks scattering all over the carpet like splashes of green acid, the dome of a barrier rose high over his head, like a bubble of glimmering, unbreakable glass. The wall of green magic cut off all interlopers, leaving him one on one with his target - and that metaphorical ravine, which he could now traverse undisturbed.  
  
Through the light-streaked glassy surface, just a pace behind his prey's back, he could see Dorian, ramming his fists violently into the barrier, his fingertips white with a charge of shock, curses flying silently off his slowly twisting lips. There was also some big, square-shouldered brute of the oxen race - perhaps a mercenary in the employ of the Inquisition as a bodyguard or an enforcer - and a black-haired woman with... quite striking, finely chiselled features (he was not going off tangents here; just making an objective observation). Both of them were straining to shatter the dense layer of ghostly glass by repeatedly pounding it with their weapons - a crude, barbed two-handed cleaver and a standard military blade, respectively. But after each strike, the barrier only grew more opaque, more deeply green, with ribbons of searingly bright glow snaking back and forth along its curve.  
  
Their motions - and Dorian's, for that matter - appeared clunky, broken up into a succession of sparse jitters. Probably because time was passing differently outside the barrier - like it did in those spinning circles of yellow-green light that had started cropping up all over Redcliffe since his... interception of the rebel mages. The little wisp in his head may have tried to raise a fuss, to warn him that his magic was still experimental and should never have been wielded on such an uncontrolled way. But those words, too, were empty and meaningless.  
  
The spell's shield was not going to hold forever, obviously - but he did not need forever. Just a minute or so - and then the ravine would be crossed, with no turning back. Their precious 'Herald' would be gone, and the Elder One would prevail, raising the withered Imperium from its knees... Or whatever it was he said he would do. That did not matter quite as much as the Elder One's other promise. Quite as much as... Felix.  
  
He could see him too - a shadow in his peripheral vision, lashing at the spell wall with tears in his eyes, over and over again, until a figure in a dark turquoise mage's robe (Fiona?) pulled him back - also in a jerking slow motion.  
  
Poor boy. Oh his poor boy. He did not deserve this - any of this. Be it the touch of wasting sickness, bubbling like tar under his ashen skin, crushing his chest and temples with its slurping black waves; or the sight of his father abandoning all that he had once held dear, all that he had once taught others... and turning into a monster.  
  
Catching a glimpse of him, pale and gasping for breath and still trying to reach for the barrier even as he writhed in Fiona's arms - even fleetingly, out of the corner of his eye - was pure agony. As though someone had cast a shard of ice in the pit of his stomach, then commanding it to shoot upwards, so that it ruptured his vital organs one by one and thrust its thick, lumpy lance into his throat, benumbing his flesh and making him gag. But it was all right... Quite all right... Unlike Felix, he deserved this pain, and was ready to endure it, and worse, for as long as it might take. Felix's suffering, on the other hand, was going to be over soon. The Elder One had bargained with him for the cure - and he was in the middle of upholding his end of that bargain.  
  
His target - his killing mark, his hunter's prey - had made an attempt to raise her staff, a burst of orange mage fire coiling over its tip. Flames, really? That was her plan - to shoot at him with flames... And burn away the air beneath the barrier's dome? Whatever did they teach them in the Southern Circles... apart from dreading the sound of the very word 'Templar'?  
  
Huffing a bit to himself in mild contempt, he made another flicking gesture - and, driven by his will, beams of greenish-blue glow trailed rapidly towards the target, closing a tight loop round her ankles and making an abrupt yank that knocked the staff out of her grasp.  
  
'Let me go... you fucking... Vint!' she spat, straining to free herself from his telekinetic magic - which crept further up her body, holding her limbs in place like a serpent constricting its catch. After a moment of idle thought, he actually added a couple of hissing, wide-open fanged maws to light beams - so that now it looked like his quarry had been paralyzed by the grip of a whole nest of conjured serpents. Cliché, as Dorian would point out; but he was long past caring.  
  
With the target thus subdued, he looked long and hard into her eyes - bright green, almost like the frenzied pulses of light throbbing through the clenched fingers of her left hand - and poured all of his magical reserves into focusing on her image. The Herald. The girl from the Fade. The little southern mageling that had stolen power from a would-be god. The subject of his most grand experiment yet - a new journey back in time that would erase her very presence in the history of Thedas, so that the Elder One's ritual might go as planned. And he might receive his reward.  
  
The crackling of arcane energy within the barrier grew almost too loud to bear; he felt something warm and wet and metal-tinged trickling out of his ears, while a shrill twang rang painfully against his temples and the crown of his head. Just like last time. Just like when he had rushed to the Conclave's aftermath, to lure away the rebel mages. The magic was working. He was flying over the ravine. And as soon as he made it for the other side, the exchange would be complete. Felix's life for the life of the meddlesome Trevelyan child.  
  
'You are a mistake,' he thought he heard himself saying, the metallic warmth now lapping at the back of his throat. 'You should never have existed'.  
  
The Herald's mouth stretched out into a noiseless scream - and then, as though she were drowning in a stagnant pond, dissolved in a whirl of muddied green. The colour filled his whole field of view, turning to an inky black, while the crackle died into cold, dead silence.  
  
He was just beginning to think, fear pooling up in his lungs like icy water, that he must have botched it, that the journey back in time must have killed him - and served him right too, but Felix... Felix... What would the Elder One do to him, when his father was no longer there, no longer being useful... When the veil of blackness rolled back, melting back into stagnant green again. Which then began to turn lighter in some places and deeper in others, sculpting a bizarre landscape that could only be found in the Fade - with rocks floating amid jade clouds and rotating in place so that it was barely possible to tell which way was up and which was down.  
  
This... This was not how the spell was supposed to go. He shouldn't have been thrown into the Fade like this. And why... why did he feel like there was a whole swathe of his memories missing?  
  
'If Dorian tampered with my amulet... I... I...'  
  
Muttering furiously to himself, magister Gereon Alexius slowly clambered up from the kneeling pose he had apparently been pushed into - and then cried out at a sudden splash of scalding pain across his left palm. A bleary, blinking glance down revealed that his spike-adorned gloves were gone... And that his bare hand was split with a flaring green scar.


	2. Chapter 2

This was fine. This was absolutely fine. There was no reason to panic - not just yet.   
  
Since he was in the Fade, this had to be a dream. A bizarre, feverish vision. Nothing else. Nothing alarming. Nothing unexpected. Merely the logical consequence of him having had to so meticulously plan out the Herald's capture, and thus to forego the few hours he would normally allow himself to waste on sleep every couple of days (begrudgingly, for he was constantly needed by Felix's side).  
  
Now his exhaustion had finally caught up with him and started playing tricks on his over-strained mind - exhaustion coupled with... yes, he supposed he could call it an obsession. A most unhealthy fixation on his quarry, and on those Rift-sealing abilities of hers. Small wonder that he was now imagining what he would have looked like if he had borne the same Mark as her. Small wonder. Really.  
  
And now that he had figured it all out, all he had to do was breathe in, breathe out, keep his wits about him, and force himself to wake up. Wake up. Wake up and move on from this.  
  
He was just getting started on the breathing part - with shrill wheezes escaping his mouth as he forcibly exaggerated the rises and falls on his chest - when the pattern was broken by a small, piteous moan coming from some clot of green mist or other, one of those blurry cloudy trails that were floating to and fro by his side.  
  
Pinching the bridge of his nose - a habitual gesture he would often make to refocus his scattering thoughts after sensing that he was beginning to doze over his reams of reams of ink-splattered paper - Alexius followed the direction of the noise with his gaze... And right before his eyes, the mist cascaded, water-like, into nothingness, exposing a hovering rock slab that Alexius definitely did not remember being there but a moment before.   
  
Flat as a table board, and about the size of one a well, this thin slice of porous black mineral - with glinting emerald flakes nesting here and there, like torch bugs in rotting wood - was suspended in the greenish air roughly at the level of Alexius' chest. And lying on top of it, one arm and one leg dangling limply over the edge, was... The Herald. The Trevelyan girl, the very same Trevelyan girl he had been trying to erase from time. Still there, as plain as daylight - evidently unconscious, with her slightly angular face warped by a grimace of pain, and with a moist, lumpy mark of a recent burn spreading along the side of her neck, and possibly further down, under the oily charred rags half her clothing had turned into. Which, incidentally, was not the long leather jacket and breastplate with the burning eye symbol that Alexius had seen on her in Redcliffe. Rather, it was a Circle mage's robe, like the ones many of Fiona's rebels had still been clad in, even after their towers fell. Supposedly blue at some point long ago, the garb (or, well, the part of it untouched by fire) was faded and travel-worn and woefully drab to an eye used to Tevinter fashion... Not that it was of any consequence. Or was it?  
  
This dream was becoming more and more convoluted. Whatever demon was in charge of this pocket of the Fade... It had to be putting him through a test of some sort.  A mind game to check the extent of his dedication to serving the Venatori and destroying the enemies of the new Tevinter.  
  
And, a sick feeling slapping its clammy hand against the inside of his gut, Alexius realized that he was failing.  
  
All this time, he had been painstakingly training himself to hate the girl from the Fade. To view her as... not even quite a person; just an annoying pebble in his master's shoe (a glorious shoe, as some of the Venatori insisted) that he, like an obedient slave, was to shake out. This had made it easier to do his duty to the order, and to save his son. After all, the worth of a pebble could hardly be compared to the worth of his Felix's survival. And yet now... Now, he could no longer see a pebble.  
  
Now, as she lay before him, wounded and still in the robes she must have wandered in before being picked up as a mascot by the Inquisition, all he saw was... A young girl; even younger than Felix. Barely out of her twenties. Hurtled from the prison she had been locked in all her life into the boundless, broiling, war-torn world, to fight demons and seal the ruptures in the Veil and hold her ground against some pathetic excuse for an evil mastermind that told her she should never have existed.   
  
So much chaos, so much anguish, so much physical and mental strain - at an age when she was supposed to peacefully study for her exams, and learn the ropes of adult life, and develop crushes. In a way, her lot was not as unlike Felix's as Alexius had insisted in his arguments with himself. Hers had also been a tragically brief life, once doubtlessly full of promise and hope and light - and then irrevocably tainted by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. By crossing paths with a foe far more formidable than any mindless darkspawn.  
  
Alexius knew not who was whispering those words to him: a demon slipping into his ear like one of those tropical leeches that would sometimes take residence in the dank, soup-like waters of the once crystalline pools of the crumbling, abandoned public bath houses of Tevinter; or that nagging mind wisp of his that refused to die. Either way, before he even knew it, he found himself sinking helplessly into some unseen pit, deep as the bottom of the sea, under the onslaught of a colossal, crushing wave of guilt, and pity, and poignant nostalgia for a time, some half a decade ago, when Felix had been the same age as the Herald, with his future dazzlingly bright and vividly rosy like the sunrises over the golden rooftops of his beloved Val Royeaux; and when both he and his parents had been so certain that they would be happy forever... Like the Herald must have been certain that she would prevail over the cackling wicked magister that had stolen her fellow mages. And then altered her own fate.   
  
The wave hit him hard, the impact resonating in his chest in a sharp, burning pang - and when he finally resurfaced, dizzy and out of breath as if he had actually dived underwater, he was astonished to see that he had stepped closer to the hovering slab, and that his hands were already moving an inch or so above the mangled body of the Herald... Or just Trevelyan, he supposed - since she did not have the Mark in this dream of his.   
  
Spread out and filled with tension, his fingers were weaving a circling pattern that by now, after endless months of running test upon test on Felix's ailing body, had become so familiar that he could retrace it with his eyes closed. The outline of a healing glyph.  
  
That was a stupid, ludicrous thing to do - and he was well aware. This was not the real Trevelyan; soothing her burn was not going to erase what he had done to her. Or to her fellow southern mages.  To all the other lost children in threadbare robes, now destined to toil away as third-class almost-citizens in Tevinter.  
  
And even if she were more than a figment of his crazed imagination, he should not have tried to help her. That would have been a betrayal of the Elder One; heinous blasphemy for which their deal would have been called off in an instant.    
  
But the wave had shaken him so much... And in the wake of ebbing, it had awoken an odd, lingering ache within him; an urge to do something, anything, that would be... kind. Not desperate, not cruel, like most of the things he had done in these past days. Not blighted (and he meant that word choice) by knowing what he had become. Not as part of a bargain. Or for any other purpose, for that matter. Just... Just kind.  
  
The glyph rippled and tingled like a myriad bells of glass, green and gold sparks raining off it and planting themselves into the raw folds of the girl's scorched skin. And as a seed would sprout when dug into the soil, so these bright kernels of magic sprouted, and the threads of fresh warm light that grew from them stitched together the gashes in bleeding, blistering flesh, until nothing remained but pale, hardened scars.  
  
Its work complete, the glyph evaporated into one last swoosh of golden sparks - and just at that moment, Trevelyan gasped and threw her eyes open.  
  
'Andraste's tits!' she squawked, her gaze wild and unfocused and not quite registering the strange man that had just brought her back to consciousness.  
  
'She told us to run!'


	3. Chapter 3

Sliding off the slab with a small half-stifled exhalation - at least the ground had not decided to waltz off from under her feet - young Trevelyan glanced around, whipping her head swiftly from side to side. Presently, she appeared to have selected one direction - a steep rock wall with an uneven path carved into its side. At the top of the wall, there was a vertical stripe of luminous green, like a clear window opened wide among the heavy swampy vapours.  
  
A few determined strides later - and the girl was already at the foot of the path, bobbing impatiently on the balls of her feet and beckoning Alexius to follow her.  
  
'Come on!' she cried. 'We have to get out of here! Warn... Someone... About something!'  
  
Cutting herself off in frustration, she tossed her head from one shoulder to the other like she was getting water out of her ears.  
  
'Stupid headache! There's so much I can't remember for some reason... But the important thing is: we've got to hurry! Oh, and yes... Thanks for healing me! I will express my gratitude properly once we are done running! Which we really have to do!.. Apparently?'  
  
With each word spoken, she braved a little bit more of the path, and whenever her tone rose to an exclamation point, she made an emphatic pause and looked meaningfully at Alexius.  
  
He lingered, however, eyebrows knitted. According to most sources, when one was in the Fade and a light source appeared up ahead, that usually meant that one was nearing death. And he was not ready to die - not just yet.  
  
For as long as there was still hope that he might cure Felix, his existence was worth prolonging, even with the nearly constant sensation of tight vice cutting into his heart, while the world around him turned more bleak and barren by the minute, without his Livia in it.  
  
He had to emerge from this dream while still breathing. He had to be there to see the Elder One's next move. To heal and protect his son. So let the Fade girl traipse off into the light if she so wished; she was nothing but a ghost anyway.  
  
He had already planted his feet firmly into the green-specked rock floor, his mind set on staying put until his eyes opened in the waking world - but suddenly, Trevelyan froze, one foot still raised to make yet another step uphill, and then turned around clumsily, with her back towards the light and her eyes boring into something behind Alexius.  
  
'Watch out!' she cried, flapping her hand awkwardly until she managed to conjure a fire ball (he could swear, watching the southern Circle children's attempts at spellcasting sometimes verged on physical suffering; it really showed that they were being discouraged from adding flair and elegance to their craft).  
  
'Those Templars look... wrong!'  
  
Alexius slanted his eyes, also readying a flame spell just in case - but what he saw was nothing like imposing figures in steel plate armour. What he saw was a pack of darkspawn: long, curved teeth gnashing, blackened when they met the dripping gums; rock-hard claws stretched forward, grappling and greedy; eyes milky-white in the darkened sockets of deformed skulls that could be seen quite clearly through thin, sickly skin, translucent and wobbly like yellow jelly.  
  
For a split second, he came much too close to swaying and falling, as a surge of primal, instinctive dread had caused all feeling to vanish from his hands and feet, and turned his heart to a heavy lump of ice. But the ice quickly melted - as soon as it dawned on him what he was dealing with. If this dream-like double of Trevelyan - a southern Circle mage - claimed that she was seeing Templars, and Alexius was seeing darkspawn, the very monsters that had killed his wife and infected his son, then in reality those were fearlings. Lesser Fade beings under the command of a nightmare demon, with the ability to transform themselves into whichever creatures (people included) that the victim was afraid of the most. Well, he was not going to let them get the better of him! Not while there was still so much to be done!  
  
Both Alexius' and Trevelyan's spell charges hit their peak at the same time, their combined fiery force showering the fearlings like a miniature volcanic eruption (of the kind first-grade Circle students would on for show as proof of their growing magical ability... except deadlier, of course). Recoiling under a volley of red-hot embers, the creatures shed their guise - quite literally. They wriggled out of the darkspawn (and Templar) skin with a nauseating rustle, with the upper four legs of their true spider-like form probing at the air while the lower four were kneading at the folds of their discarded flesh sacks and the oozing, hairy pincers were parting with a hiss-like stretch and then meeting again in a demanding, voracious click. A new, stronger torrent of fire tossed some of them back, their long limbs curling up on their scorched underbellies - but where these spiders hissed and clicked their last, new ones emerged, seemingly solidifying themselves out of the mists of the Fade.  
  
While his arms were busy hurtling around bolts of flame, Alexius bit down hard into his lips and, once again, ordered himself to wake up - wake up, damn it! But no matter how much he rages inwardly at himself for getting stuck in this nightmare, the Fade refused to release him. One breathless, hazy moment of fighting off spiders rushed by after another - and he still remained amid the coils of green miasma, at the foot of a path towards the light, with a heaving carpet of arachnid bodies stretched out before him as far as eye could see - and, speaking of eyes, clusters of glowing dots kept cropping up through the fog that began when the spider horde ended. Round dots, grouped into clusters of eight - and filled with an almost palpable hunger.  
  
It seemed that Alexius had no choice. Unless he wanted the fearlings to overwhelm him, to drag him off and rip him apart, leading him to wake up either dead or Tranquil - he had to run. Follow Trevelyan, who was still fidgeting anxiously on the rocky path - and race straight into the light.  
  
And so he did - while the spiders poured after him, filling up the narrow path as some manner of monstrous landslide, and even managing to skitter up the parts of the rock wall that would have been too steep for a human being to reach. Alexius strained to his utmost to retain a distance of at least a couple of paces between himself and the creatures... But was somewhat hindered by the fact that the dream had suddenly decided to become realistic, and to remind him of his age. His heart swung from side to side within his chest at an insanely rapid frequency, like a haywire pendulum - and since he was beginning to taste blood, hot and sticky at the back of his throat, he could easily imagine how it pinned itself onto his ribcage in between swooshes. His limbs, too, were being burned away by an intense ache; and his vision clouded over, so that he could now make out only the blobby outline of Trevelyan ahead of him... And also - someone else? A woman? Or at least... A being with a somewhat feminine outline and a curious trapezoid piece of headwear on its head... A shimmering silhouette painted in a stroke of purest white, brighter even that the light he was hauling himself towards.   
  
It could be a spirit... Or another demon spawn, wearing a deceptively friendly guise. Or maybe... What had those southern bumpkins whispered about Trevelyan in the waking world? No; that couldn't be...  
  
Trevelyan had already climbed the topmost, steepest stretch of the path, and was about to vanish through the window of light - but Alexius was still lagging behind, almost on his hands and knees, his skull cracking with a deafening mix of his own blood's pounding throb and the pitter-patter of dozens, if not hundreds, pursuing spiders. And just when he was about to give up and slip down to the bottom of the rock wall, his face plastered into the path, the white figure reached out to him, its glowing hand looking so very reassuring and welcoming.  
  
With no energy left to think this through, no thought left except 'Damn, my heart is going to burst', he lurched forward and clasped at those outstretched fingers - surprisingly solid for an apparition of the Fade. The figure pulled him to safety; the window of light flashed, blinding him as though he were looking directly at the sun... And, with a forceful shudder and a wave of cold, he thought that he, at long last, felt himself waking up.


	4. Chapter 4

 

When the kaleidoscope of spots before Alexius' eyes settled into clearly visible contours of walls and floor and ceiling, it became more than obvious that he was not in the Redcliffe castle any longer. At least, not in the part of that... quaint little home of a southern noble that he remembered.  
  
This was clearly a dungeon: most of the space on all four sides of him was starkly lined with metal bars. Contrasting with the pitch blackness behind them, they seemed to drip with an orange shimmer, in the light of the few smoking, coughing torches that were mounted in sconces on the occasional thin strip of masonry not taken up by the bars. It took Alexius a moment or two of groggy blinking to figure out whether he was inside or outside a prison cell. Apparently, it was the latter: he had been dragged into the dungeon's very centre and forced on his knees (again) in the square of freezing-cold, slightly damp stone floor, surrounded by iron-barred doors... One of which was to swing open and let him into his new abode, perhaps?  
  
The thought was far from uplifting. As was the sight and feel of the coarse, itchy prison rags that had replaced his Venatori-issued robes, and of the cast-iron shackles that pulled down his hands; thick and heavy and so tight that he could barely feel anything below his wrists, the blood flow all but cut off.  
  
Who had put these on him? Who had brought him here? And why?  
  
The answer came to him soon enough, as, grimacing slightly, he shifted his gaze from the flaring bars and his numb chained hands to the shadowy figures that stood over him, half-faceless in the uneven torchlight. There was little of them that he could discern, but even that was enough: they were warriors, with bared blades all pointing at him, and with the familiar flaming eye engraved into their cuirasses.  
  
The Inquisition! The blighters must have captured him as retribution for using time magic on their Herald; but... But how were they still around? He should have altered the chain of events after the Conclave; without Trevelyan to cement their cause, the southerners should not have been able to withstand the might of the Elder One! They should have promptly succumbed to the Venatori, now unhindered by any... lost child with a glowing hand!  
  
Glowing hand. Glowing. Hand. Precisely when those words flitted through Alexius' racing mind, the numbness of his left palm was broken up by a prickle of pain.  
  
He was afraid to look at this point; but he did not even need to tip his head or move his eyes to see the green glow that shot from the direction of his shackles, setting off a fountain of sparks as high up as the tip of his nose. The Fade's Mark - the Anchor, as the Elder One had called it while seething about the thief that had messed with the Venatori's ritual - was still there. Did that mean that Alexius was still dreaming? That by jumping into the light, he had drifted from one nightmare to another?  
  
But this dungeon looked and felt so real; even smelled real, of tangy weeks'-old moisture with a dash of earth and smoke. And - even though it was rather challenging to make observations in this poor light - so far, he had not spotted any telltale markings that may have given his surroundings away as a demon's creation. No oddly positioned objects that would have defied the laws of nature (like furniture on the ceiling or water jugs hanging in mid-air with the contents never spilling). No human or elven faces that suddenly turned flat and skewed, as though they were covered by masks with a child's scribbles on them: because demons drew images from human memory, and the latter was far from a flawless repository; some things were bound to get lost or stored in the mind as a lazy over-exaggeration.  
  
Granted, the Inquisition soldiers mostly kept to the shadows, but even when half-lit, their features were decidedly three-dimensional; and besides, some of them did not stand still, shifting their weight and adjusting their hold of their weapons - and the blotches of darkness on their faces moved as they did, in perfect accordance with the principles of optics (or so Alexius had heard from Felix when he would gush about the research of his fellows at the University of Orlais). And most importantly, none of their eyes burned with that unnatural cold green light, as demonic shades' eyes likely would! No, the only thing that glowed green was his hand. Why? Why? Why?!  
  
'Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now!'  
  
A new figure had arrived on the scene, tall and imposing, also with an unsheathed sword. It moved in sweeping strides past the soldiers until it stopped an inch away from Alexius, the dashes of torchlight and contrasting shadow sculpting a visage of raw, barely restrained anger.  
  
He... He knew that face. The dark-haired woman from Trevelyan's entourage. The owner of those striking cheekbones. This was the closest they had ever approached each other - and she looked like she had every intention to crush his windpipe. And then dice up his neck like a bruised purple sausage. And he did not really fault her for that.  
  
'The Conclave is destroyed!' she went on, her voice loud and quivering with emotion. 'Everyone who attended is dead! Except for you - and that young mage with burn marks. She claims that you saved her life in the Fade - but for all we know, she could be your accomplice!'  
  
At least, this had to be what she was saying. Approximately.  
  
Somewhere along the way, Alexius' attention had drifted away from her vehement speech: he had become quite distracted by her features. Not... Not in that sense! Like he had noted in Redcliffe, she was objectively, undeniably, an exceptionally attractive woman. That was a given. But at the moment, this scientific fact was, again, irrelevant. What had caught Alexius' eye was something far more specific than her overall beauty - it was the deep cut across her cheek.  
  
He remembered seeing it in Redcliffe too - but back then, it had been a scar. Now, it looked fresh, still ruby red and held together with rather clumsy stitching (not a healer's work - he would know; she had to be one of the 'Get away from me, I am fine!' types, and must have patched up her cheek by herself). And - assuming that he was not dreaming - that could only mean one thing...  
  
'This is the past,' he murmured to himself. 'The new past. I am living through the aftermath of the Conclave... Where Trevelyan is not the Herald. But I am... Fasta vaas, what have I done?!'  
  
Most of his words had been barely audible, slurred together into a feverish whisper - but when it came to that last phrase, he could not help but raise his voice, his own conclusion having arrived like a powerful punch in the pit of his stomach. And the sound of his exclamation, especially that shrill Tevene curse at the end, made the scarred woman exhale in shock.  
  
'Your accent...' she blurted out, whipping her blade forward so that its cutting edge rested under Alexius' chin, not breaking skin (yet) but still stinging at him because the steel was cold as ice.  
  
'You are a Tevinter! Why are you here?! What would someone from the Imperium be doing this far south? At a holy site, no less?'  
  
She herself also spoke Common with a very peculiar pronunciation, making every syllable come out abrupt like the chop of her trusty sword - and as Alexius recognized the sound pattern, he could not resist quipping back at her... Though his voice came out somewhat faint, as he was still writhing internally under the crushing weight of his revelation.  
  
'Well, Nevarra is not exactly close either, and yet...'  
  
The woman's nostrils flared.  
  
'Nevarra does not bow to the Black Divine! Or swim in the blood of its slaves!'  
  
No, it did not, did it? Her countrymen were more about pulling the strings of the dead than the living.  
  
Alexius attempted to draw a shaky sigh - as well as he could, with that sword edge constricting him - and glanced absently at the misty blot that his breath had made on the polished steel.  
  
He really wished he could move his hands higher than half an inch; the urge to focus his mind by pinching his nose bridge was almost too much. Well, he supposed he had to do without.  
  
Think, Gereon, think. Keep calm. Try not to be deafened by that insane drumming in your temples. Swallow that unuttered scream. Ignore the intrusive wish to bang your head against the wall until your forehead turned into bleeding mush, cursing yourself for bungling up your own spell.  
  
Think. Just think.  
  
How to proceed? What to tell the Nevarran interrogator? The... The truth? Yes, the truth sounded sensible. Or at least part of it. In terms that the southerners could understand.  
  
Witty banter was well and good, but he saw no point in drawing out this charade: in hiding who he was and why he was here. The Inquisition - this past version of the Inquisition, freshly formed and doubtlessly still blundering about, trying to investigate who had torn the sky open - was going to find out about the Elder One either way. After all, the self-proclaimed savior of Tevinter was not too good at being subtle.  
  
And since Alexius was the Herald now - damn, no matter how hard he struggled for composure, the notion still made his head ache! - these sword-waving brutes had to keep him alive, to close Rifts and such. Hopefully for long enough to reach out to Felix – who had to still be back home this far in the past. And that was all that mattered.  
  
'I am here because...' Alexius began slowly, lifting his eyes up again and holding the Nevarran's blazing gaze.  
  
'...Because that lovely green rupture in the sky outside is the work of my compatriots. A... A cult, I suppose you would call them. They performed a ritual; I am not privy to the details. That mage girl had nothing to do with it, incidentally. She is just an...'  
  
His tone grew almost mournful all of a sudden, much to his own surprise - while the image of his own healing glyph blossomed before his mind's eye. The effect of the guilty wave was still far from receding.  
  
'An innocent victim of circumstance. While I myself was… um… an enforcer of sorts, if you will’.  
  
Such a crude word – but he deserved it. For his… bestial inclinations in the Redcliffe throne room. Dear heavens, how could he have thought and acted so… inhumanly?  
  
‘I was tasked with, uh... making certain that the said ritual was not interfered with. Which I obviously failed at'.  
  
He waggled his fingers weakly.  
  
'This little glowing scratch of mine was not part of the plan'.  
  
Quite an understatement, that.  
  
The Nevarran's reaction almost made Alexius regret his frankness. Her knuckles growing chalk-white, she pressed her blade deeper into his throat, drawing blood this time.  
  
'You godless maleficar!' she spat, shoulders heaving. 'You killed all those people!'  
  
'Cassandra, please! He said he was just an enforcer! A pawn! And pawns can be used!'  
  
Before the Nevarran could take her rage any further, a hand in a broad-rimmed glove had emerged out of the dark and rested on her shoulder. As the nearest torch flickered, a face became visible as well. Pale like the purest porcelain, framed by strands of copper hair. The face's owner was also a woman, and spoke with a faint Orlesian accent, which turned her voice into a silken purr: deceptively mellow, and more bloodcurdling than any of the Nevarran's livid outcries. Alexius had had plenty of experience with this manner of speaking at the Magisterium - and among the Venatori as well.  
  
'We may need him,' the Orlesian persisted, drawing the other woman - Cassandra, was it? Fitting name; She Who Shines Over Men - away from Alexius.  
  
'We do need him. Remember what Solas suggested: this Mark of his comes from the same source as the Breach. It may have the power to seal it'.  
  
She made a weighted pause, slowly leaning over Alexius and pulling up his prison rags' collar to wipe the blood off his neck with the stretched-out fabric. Most unsanitary - but given the circumstances, he suspected that this gesture was more about the show of control rather than concern over his wound... Or was it? Was he just imagining things, or had there been a fleeting hint at... softness in the Orlesian's gaze just now? Could she have also heard a call to do something that would be just kind? (She could have done with a cleaner bandage in that case, though).  
  
'I suggest we keep him around as an asset,' the Orlesian concluded, as she took a step away from Alexius, who had failed to keep from scowling at her wound-rubbing.  
  
'For the time being'.  
  
Ah. He had reasoned correctly then. Maybe... If he proved a good enough asset... He could remain one permanently? Ugh, the thought left him feeling so filthy - more than his skin behind scrubbed with grimy fraying fabric ever could.  
  
He was utterly disgusted with himself. What a snivelling turncoat he was, scheming again, bargaining again, using people again. With not a scrap of scruples left.  
  
It was true, though. It did not really make a difference which banner he crawled to, so long as his son was safe. And he could hardly approach the Elder One for a cure now - when he was the one that his master would want to kill!..  
  
Perhaps, the little wisp pointed out - far from for the first time; the only difference was that now Alexius did not hurry to silence it, much as its voice seemed to burn at him  - perhaps there had never even been a cure. Perhaps the Venatori had been - would have been - ready to feed him any promises (backed by nothing except 'Oh, the Elder One is so mighty!') just to obtain his... services. He would have been an 'asset' for them, after all. Just as for the Inquisition. At least the southerners were honest about it.  
  
'Very well, Leliana,' Cassandra huffed, sheathing her blade after a moment's hesitation. 'I will take him to the Breach. But once the immediate danger has passed, we will need to know all about this cult of his'.  
  
'Of course. I shall interrogate him most thoroughly,' Leliana smiled, and Alexius felt something shrivel up and crumble to dust inside of him.  
  
'See you at the forward camp?'


	5. Chapter 5

Alexius' amulet - and Dorian's too; the boy more than deserved at least half the credit - was most definitely not on his person. Now that his shackles were off, he could make sure of that, by discreetly patting down his own body, under the pretext of adjusting the fit of that horrendous green mercenary coat Cassandra had fished out from somewhere and tossed to him, before briskly ushering him through the gates of the building where he had been imprisoned (a village Chantry, as it turned out; bigger than the one in Redcliffe, with a lot of underground levels that indicated that it may have once served a different purpose).

 

'Here,' she had said gruffly, pointedly averting her gaze from Alexius and following almost every sentence up with a muffled grunt of displeasure. 'We will trek back through the mountains to the temple - and you people are not too used to the cold, are you? Your own robes have been confiscated, searched, and burned. Commander Cullen insisted on getting rid of possible demonic residue'.

 

Trust the southerners to destroy superior Tevinter garments. Though... Part of him - that persistent little wisp - was glad to know that those robes were gone. For even though Alexius had never been initiated into the ranks of the Elder One's army proper, the clothes he had been instructed to wear were still based on the Venatori uniform, and invoked... certain memories that he was not proud of.

 

Going back to the point. That ruled out the amulet still being wrapped up in his bundle of clothing somewhere. It could have accidentally gotten melted down when the robes were being incinerated - or maybe it had never been there in the first place. Because otherwise the Inquisition might have noticed it - and Cassandra would not have kept silent about discovering 'a vile Tevinter artifact'.

 

So this left out one last most likely option: the amulet had perished in the Conclave explosion. Alexius was now ingrained in this timeline, once and for all. As Trevelyan's replacement; the mysterious survivor Marked by the Fade; and... asset to the Inquisition. And if he ever had any doubts about diligently following his captors' directions, they all vanished the moment he stepped outside the Chantry, and into the ravished mountain valley underneath a bleeding sky, and saw every morbid detail of what the Elder One had wrought.

 

The first stretch of his journey by Cassandra's side resembled the walk of shame towards the site of the execution more than anything else. There were closely packed, panting, shuffling rows of people on either side of the path (or well, rather an impromptu trail of dark-blue footprints in the snow) along which he was bring shoved by his companion. Some of these gawkers were wearing patched, mud-streaked shirts and broad, sack-like trousers; others were dressed slightly better, but their once neat, fancifully decorated velvet vests and brocade bodices mostly looked like a gigantic hound had used them as a chew toy and then spat them out. In a few places, this motley crowd of battered refugees also flashed with spots of white and metallic grey - southern Chantry robes and warrior cuirasses. But regardless of attire, or age or gender or origin, all of the people watching Alexius pass by had their faces set into warped, accusing masks, eyebrows knitted and mouths turned into grotesque overturned letters D. More than a few of them pointed fingers at him; and Alexius could swear he saw one old crone shift her gaze from him to what looked like a dark coil of animal feces on the ground, and then back to him again, as though trying to settle on whether or not the satisfaction of pelting him was going to be worth getting her gnarly, mittened hands dirty.

 

That question was to remain unanswered, however, as Cassandra edged decisively between Alexius and the crone, giving the latter such a glare that her downy greyish shawl almost caught fire. So, the Nevarran warrior of Inquisition was noble enough not to enjoy her captives' humiliation. Again, her name fit her so very well.

 

'They have decided your guilt,' Cassandra commented, a bit abrasively. 'They need it. For at least some closure. We all mourn our beloved Divine Justinia... the Fifth...'

 

She added the postfix as an afterthought - for the benefit of a godless northerner who had spent all his life under a Tevinter rock and surely would not be able to tell the proper Divines apart.

 

'She was killed at the Conclave - by your brethren'.

 

Cassandra's eyes flashed, and somehow, her heavy glare was much more painful to endure than the dirty looks of the crowd.

 

'I know it sounds dubious - but I am sorry,' Alexius said, his breath pattern breaking for a moment. 'I... I was not among her murderers, but I understand that...'

 

He trailed off, the right words slipping out of his grasp like sand - crushed into nothing by the thought of how pathetic his apologetic farce must have looked. Cassandra had no reason to believe him; he had no reason to believe himself. But - the most curious thing - now that his boy was not constantly near him, the sight of his ashen, Blight-ravished face darkening both the eyes and mind, Alexius' faintly aching head got crowded with memories of the things that had little to do with the child's illness. Things he had been trying so stubbornly to disregard.

 

Like the shame and fear in Felix's eyes whenever Alexius opened his mouth and parroted what the Venatori had taught him. Knowing that his father had been there when this southern... Chantry person was killed, that he had stood side by side with her murderers, and the murderers of countless other innocents (even though Alexius himself did not really recall that; but this had to be what had happened) - it would have broken Felix's heart. And realizing that, just as realizing how horrified Felix had been by his actions in Redcliffe, was agony.

 

Alexius mumbled something else, trying and failing to construct a coherent phrase a couple more times - but Cassandra cut him off with an uncompromising 'Ugh!', and for the longest while, neither of them said anything further.

 

Soon, Alexius' gaze returned to the sky - and what he saw there instantly made him forget both the awkward conversation about the Divine, and the judgemental crowd. He only looked sideways to study the gawkers' faces once: when he thought he had spotted a familiar robed figure pushing its way to the front row. Trevelyan. The girl from the Fade, his former quarry – ready to live a different life now, free of the burden that had fallen to him. She waved at him, beaming - and, improbable as it might sound, he mirrored her gesture, with an inexplicable sigh of relief. The child was safe now; and if fate would have it, soon he might be able to say the same of his Felix.

 

His dear Felix. He had to be so frightened, stranded as he was in Tevinter, with the growing numbers of Venatori sympathizers rearing their heads like serpents all around him, and no-one to turn to... But not for long. Not for long, if Alexius could help it.

 

He was going to make it right. He was going to make everything right. Make it so that his child would never have to be ashamed of him again.

 

Dive all in, stuck as he was with the Mark.

 

Go further than little Trevelyan.

 

Seal the Breach instead of just stabilizing it.

 

And keep trying to formulate that elusive remedy for his darling boy's sickness, keep working, doing his research from scratch, making use of the time he had regained - and of the Inquisition's resources... Weren't the southerners supposed to have some crafty Antivan ambassador with a reputation of getting what she needed from the very bowels of the earth if need be? He vaguely remembered looking into her achievements before engaging in correspondence with her, where he insisted on a personal meeting with Trevelyan. If they had not recruited her yet, they absolutely had to...

 

And if the Elder One did possess that fabled cure - well, Alexius could always coerce it out of the Venatori, if the Inquisition were to gain advantage over them. All things considered, he refused to cross paths with the cult under any other circumstances. This turncoat was not switching sides again. Not after walking beneath the freshly opened Breach.

 

 

During his, uh, negotiations with Fiona and subsequent... residence in Redcliffe, he had mostly seen - would have mostly seen - it from a distance; out of the castle's window, on those rare moments when he had it in him to focus on something other than mixing Felix's powders and keeping the southern mages in check.

 

He recalled it as a huge clump of spinning green clouds flaring in the sky; ominous, more than unsettling (and nauseating) to look at, but already stabilized by the Herald. The previous Herald.

 

At this point in time, however, the tear in the Veil seemed to flood half the heavens. Like a torrent of hissing, bubbling acid; some hazardous potion spilling uncontrollably out of a smashed vial. Whenever each particularly large bubble burst, it would shower the ground below with chunks of white-hot rock wreathed in green smoke, each one big enough to smash a hole through the roof of a building, or even knock the skull of some hapless gawking wretch off its shoulders, in a twisted, morbid imitation of croquet or some other similar game.

 

And when it did not spew rocks, the Breach sent down shades and demons. They shrieked and writhed as they plummeted from the sky, as though someone were slipping implements of torture underneath their scabby green skin (or what passed for skin in their nebulous forms, with elongated dark holes where the eyes and mouth were supposed to be).

 

Upon making their landing, the creatures darted off in all directions, gliding over the crumbling mountain paths and across the cracking surface of the icy lake, which was now broiling and heaving and vomiting slurping steam wherever the scorching acid spit of the Fade hit the frozen crust. And with the air thus filled with zooming ghostly blurs, which ricocheted wildly here and there (in a manner that would have been laughable were the creatures not so aggressive), and with leaping demons, which moved on gangly barbed legs like nightmarish grasshoppers, the same terrible fate befell any living being that still lingered on the mountain slopes. Be it a confused, terrified animal that had strayed from its herd or pack as the latter cantered away from the wall of dark pines engulfed in green flame, or, again, some unfortunate peasant that was swallowing tears and cobbling together the last few slivers of strength to keep running, keep running, to grind their teeth and try not to think about the pain shooting through their injured limbs. Neither would escape in the end. For where the children of the mortal world swayed and dropped to the ground, overpowered by weariness, demons did not (this, according to some magisters, was what made them such excellent servants). Demons were tireless; demons were merciless; and demons were always hungry.

 

Alexius saw them feast more and more often the further he and Cassandra moved from the Inquisition's encampment. In the snowy wilderness, away from the shelter of walls and swords, it was so very easy for the spawn of the Breach to hunt down prey. To fell a struggling, screeching beast or human into the snow, and pin the wretch down, and dig, dig, dig with their steely claws at the soft, pliable flesh till the snowdrift turned from crispy white to thawing pink, while the cries of pain faded.

 

And like the snow, Alexius heart began to thaw hot, murky blood whenever he saw that - usually too far off to render aid before it was too late. Though, pushed by that same puzzling compulsion that he had experienced in the Fade, he did instinctively flex his fingers and begin to build up magic: a spluttering flame for attack in one hand, a blue-green bloom for healing in the other.

 

Cassandra, having apparently simmered down somewhat after the mention of the Divine, would always give him a long, wondering look when he did that. As charging spells apparently exerted his Mark, which was growing more and more volatile along with the Breach, this attempt to cast helpful magic was always followed by a spasm of agony twisting Alexius' lips, while his knees buckled and the veins of his left arm, almost all the way to his shoulder, jutted out through skin and cloth, highlighted in streaks of venomous glow - and whenever that happened, his Nevarran companion pulled him back to his full height, her expression (almost) appearing more concerned than hostile.

 

And then, of course, there was the incident when he, uh... how to best put it... Saved her life.


	6. Chapter 6

They had been crossing a small stone bridge - one of the many that spanned the net of deep-blue, silver-powdered ice crisscrossing the fuzzy hillocks beyond the Inquisition's settlement (must have made for quite a scenic route before getting ploughed up by cascading rocks from the Fade). Cassandra had been maneuvering through an agitated crowd that was moving in the opposite direction (away! away from the Breach!), with one hand closed firmly over Alexius' shoulder and the other ready to draw her sword at any moment, should he decide to make use of the commotion and try to bolt for freedom. Not that he ever would - but one could never trust a Tevinter cultist, could one? Look what it had almost done to Fiona.  
  
Then, suddenly, yet another chunk of acrid-smelling Fade brimstone crashed at a breakneck speed into one of the structure's supports, its smoke trail wrapping around the poor little pillar like the tentacles of an engorged greyish-green octopus.  
  
A split second before the impact, Alexius' hands - always the hands of a healer before the hands of, as Cassandra had called him, maleficar - had once more sprung into action before the gears of his mind could even properly turn. When he blinked off his own stupor, it became apparent that he was casting a telekinesis spell at his own feet, holding the loosened stones together with liquid, glue-like azure light so that the people on the bridge could get across before the whole thing collapsed.  
  
Funny what the subconscious sometimes decided to fish out: he had last tried to use this technique during to his visit to Magister Demetrius, one of the very few of his colleagues that were actually doing something to keep the Imperium's infrastructure from bursting at the seams. The telekinetic spell had been part of their joint experiment to find a way to fix the dilapidated roads. And it did turn out to be effective - though very taxing on the caster. Especially one that had a green flame devouring half his limb.  
  
By the time the last of the refugees, a gaunt elven woman with messy hair and bruised eyes, completed the crossing (herding off a flock of equally messy-haired children of various sizes, who would not stop turning back and gaping, with tiny fingers stuck in their mouths or noses, at the weird old man who had made the bridge glow), Alexius felt that his fashion disaster of a coat would have to be pried off his back with a crowbar, as the sticky, moist film of sweat had almost made it one with his skin. Whereas his left arm felt like it was about to unhinge itself from its own joints and fall apart into several convulsing parts, bared veins bristling in all directions like the exposed wiring of some smashed dwarven mechanism, and spitting out green sparks.  
  
The moment the smallest of the elven children had waddled off to safety (oh, how his countrymen would mock him for stopping to help a rattus; and how his Felix would smile, reassured that his father was slowly clawing his way back to being the man he and Dorian remembered), Alexius exhaled hoarsely in utter exhaustion... And put out the light of his spell.  
  
The very instant it was released, the bridge broke down into a rumbling stream of debris, which cascaded onto the ice, carrying Alexius and Cassandra with it. Thankfully, the tumble proved less traumatic than he may have feared; albeit his legs did at one point come close to bending over backwards and resting on his shoulders. Ultimately, their fall was broken by a thick layer of burlap that protected the contents of a large, heavily laden wooden cart that looked like it had been abandoned during the mass flight from the Breach - on the stretch of the rime-shackled river that was still intact... So far.  
  
Whooshing down the covered cart like children down a slide (in Tevinter, those were mostly used for games at the seaside, but slides could also work with this snow substance... theoretically), both Alexius and Cassandra landed on their hands and knees among the chaotically strewn paraphernalia that had spilled out of a splintered hole in its side. Battle supplies, for the most part, perhaps meant to reinforce the Inquisition's militia: a couple of shields, a sheathed blade, a mage's staff that looked like it was about to snap in the middle... And also, oddly enough, a wheel of cheese. Big and bright-yellow, with only one narrow slice carved out of it. High-quality, too, by the looks of it (when coming back from university on holiday, Felix would sometimes bring home samples of fine Orlesian cheeses as a treat for his family). Very out of place in a pile of Ferelden weaponry.  
  
But Alexius could not afford to waste too much time on pondering the cheese's presence in a supply cache: there was a demon to deal with.  
  
The creature had fallen from the Breach not a dozen steps away from him and Cassandra, splashing downwards like a thick clot of lava and then drawing itself up and gradually moulding into an inhumanly tall, hunchbacked figure with long arms, which were shaded the deep, blackened crimson colour of congealing blood, and had knotty, fiery-yellow veins running along them. These arms, raised in a grabbing gesture, ended in almost human-like hands, with stretched-out fingers and large, bulbous white-hot nails, as though someone had been trying to sculpt a regular mortal person's hands out of glass in a heated kiln, but they came out deformed and half-melted.  
  
A rage demon. One of the more primitive creatures found in the Fade, not too hard to fend off - but the worst adversary imaginable when you were walking on ice over deep, swirling dark waters.  
  
As the demon glided towards Cassandra, who had leapt to her feet and raised her shield, ready for battle, its flaming aura made the once rock-solid ice grow thin, sagging in like a sponge, with thaw water pooling above its softened crush like glistening perspiration. Presently, Cassandra already found herself surrounded by pockmarks of steaming holes, where the lake slurped loudly, as if smacking its lips in the hungry anticipation of swallowing her up.   
  
The demon had floated upwards a few inches, so that the water barely even splashed at it - but a mortal warrior in a set of heavy armour had no such luxury. No matter in which direction Cassandra tried to step, her eyes darting restlessly to measure the distance between herself and the demon, the holes in the ice would always creep up on her, merging and expanding with a sickening crackle. Up till the moment when she found herself standing on a slippery, unstable blob of ice, separated from a clumsily rising Alexius by a rippling dark ribbon, with the voracious water encroaching on her from all sides, and the demon darting to and fro right before her stunned, sweating face.  
  
Whenever it swiped at Cassandra, again and again, with its gnarled hands of red glass, leaving inky scorch dashes across her shield, the demon leered, threads of red and orange goo throbbing between its jaws. It was almost as if it had intelligence enough to gloat: for even the slightest motion, the smallest strike of Cassandra's blade at the creature in front of her, set the floe of ice off-balance, drawing a startled gasp out of her lips as she struggled not to slide off into one of the tar-black whirlpools that surrounded her, gushing out opaque milky vapour.  
  
Something had to be done, and quickly, before Cassandra's final foothold melted away and the weight of her cuirass and massive iron-plated boots pulled her to the bottom of the lake. Fire magic was out of the question, of course - as was lightning, with so much water all around. A good charge of frost would have been ideal, both for putting out the demon's flames and reinforcing the lake's shield of ice - but no sooner did Alexius try to roll a ball of enchanted, glittering bluish snow between his palms, when the pain of the Mark rapidly began to eat through his skin like flames would eat through a sheet of paper, bringing tears to his eyes and compelling him to stop spellcasting.   
  
If only he had something at his disposal to focus his magical energy with. Something like... A staff.   
  
Alexius' eyes slanted back to the cart, which still lay on solid ice. There was a staff in there, he had seen it; half-broken, but it would have to do. He believed he had it in him to squeeze a simple whiff of telekinesis out of his trembling hands. Not something as advanced as that spell back on the bridge; just enough to shift the weapon closer to him. But, ah, trust his luck: the staff was not quite within the reach of his magic. That stupid cheesewheel was, though. As if it could be of any use against a raging creature of flame. Unless... That would be most undignified, of course - but he had always encouraged his students to use their spells creatively.  
  
His lips twitching in what, as he suspected, was a smile, Alexius cast a loop of greenish light over the cheese (with his right hand, while his left was pressed to his chest, still twitching in pain). Closing the loop's hold, he reeled his gastronomic catch in - and then spun it several times over his head, giving it proper momentum, and released it straight into the demon's face.  
  
A split second upon touching the creature's lava-like skin, the cheesewheel began to melt, slurping and sizzling in a way that, quite in spite of himself, set Alexius' stomach growling. Soon, the crispy, delicious-looking mass of hot cheese clogged up the demon's beady eyes and oven-like maw - thus, it had no choice but to back away from Cassandra, bobbing in the air with a series of stifled confused grunts, and helplessly threshing the air with its venous red arms, lumpy yellow cobwebs flapping about it and plastering themselves to its sides like ropes.  
  
Cassandra had to bend down her knees for a second or two, overwhelmed with shock. And when she stood straight again, it was not on a tiny white crumble in a fathomless whirlpool - but on a steady, supportive icy floor again. For, making use of the demon's confusion, Alexius had shuffled closer to the cart and gotten a hold of that mage's staff. Its condition was even more dismal than upon first glance: in essence, it was an entirely separate tip and shaft held in place by a single wobbly splinter.  
  
Such a feeble construct could backfire at the caster at any moment - but before it began spitting blasts of freezing blue magic into his face, Alexius had managed to channel his power through it, striking the poor splintered thing on the ground and nodding to himself in satisfaction as silver feathery patterns of rime began enveloping the thawing ice floes, drawing them together like jigsaw pieces and glossing them over with several layers of crispy coating. After that was done, Alexius hastened to throw the two halves of the staff far over his head, swallowing down a hoarse 'Oof!' as the strain made his glowing left arm pulse madly.   
  
The staff zoomed off like a firework, blue sparks bouncing off it and volatile, throbbing white flames bursting through the ever-deepening cracks in its shaft. It would have exploded for certain, had it not landed into a snow bank, causing a miniature avalanche to crawl down to the rim of the frozen water.  
  
Cassandra, in the meanwhile, did the rest of the work on the demon. Sliding forth across the freshly re-frosted lake, she brought the creature down with a powerful shield bash. The demon fell backwards onto the ice, and while its body began melting a hole through it again, it no longer had the strength to float off again, not when it was being pounded relentlessly with a weapon and shield, and smothered by melted cheese. The only way that it could go was down, into the water, which extinguished its blazing aura with an odd vaporous hiss that sounded almost like a wheezing cackle. Turned instantaneously into a charred, cheese-dipped husk, the demon's corpse sank to the bottom, the deep current near the bed of the lake washing it apart into flakes of ash.  
  
'Let us hope it does not reassemble itself with time and decide to possess some poor fisherman come spring,' Alexius observed, coming up behind Cassandra. 'You do have spring here in the south, don't you?'  
  
'It's not likely, is it?' Cassandra asked, as she turned her head and scanned both Alexius' hands suspiciously, with her blade still in a battle position, as though she were expecting the scheming Vint to flourish another cheesewheel and shove her head through it.  
  
'The demon's revival, I mean; not spring'.  
  
'No, it is not,' Alexius confirmed, lifting his hands up, palms forward, to demonstrate to his companion that he had no hidden magic tricks up his sleeve - except for the undying green flame that stung his left side.  
  
'The creature's essence must have already been reabsorbed into the Fade, where it will become something entirely new with time. What lies on the bottom of the lake is nothing more than... an overfried cheese stick'.  
  
Cassandra rolled her eyes with a mild shake of her head, and walked over to the cart's side, where she took up a corner of the burlap covering and began ferociously rubbing off the few splashes of melted cheese that had stuck to her sword. All the while, she kept squinting at Alexius, and then back at the cart, past her makeshift sword-cleaning rag, as though searching for something.  
  
'Stand still,' she snapped at him at one point. 'And keep those hands up until I am done!'  
  
'Very well, have it your way,' Alexius obeyed, somewhat bewildered - especially since the sword was already burning in the sun with a pristine cleanliness, and Cassandra would still not get away from the cart.  
  
'Might I inquire what you are looking for? A new set of chains to keep my magic in check?'  
  
'I am looking for another staff,' Cassandra explained, her voice making an impatient leap in pitch. 'I cannot leave you defenseless. Even in the face of a demonic horde of your own making'.  
  
Alexius pursed his lips. That remark echoed within him in a painful jolt. A reminder that, for all his noble aspirations some time ago, he was still a captive maleficar. A treacherous serpent defecting from a next of other treacherous serpents. Cassandra was protecting him for the sake of his hand, not himself as a person. If she had her way, she would have likely carved his Mark out and waved it around at Rifts all by herself.  
  
The bitterness stirred by that thought burned his chest so much that he could not help but repeat it out loud.   
  
Cassandra frowned, tapping absently at the shaft of another staff, in a marginally better condition, which she had just pulled out of the debris.  
  
'I bear no fondness for you, that is true,' she admitted at length. 'But... But you did save me just now, even though...'  
  
'Even though it was cheesy?' Alexius joked dryly - as a mechanical reflex, while his eyes locked with Cassandra's, each putting a great mental effort into trying to puzzle out the other.  
  
Cassandra huffed in annoyance.  
  
'Do not be glib with me while I am trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, Tevinter! I meant that you could have used my... predicament to your advantage; you could have left me to drown, or to be burned up by a demon, and run back to your cult!'  
  
Alexius jerked his right shoulder (his left was still cracking with pain on occasion) in a dismissive half-shrug.   
  
'Perhaps I had nothing to run back to', he said, reaching out for the staff, which Cassandra still would not hand to him, deep in thought as she was.  
  
'Remember what your friend Leliana said about me. I am a pawn. And there are various reasons why people become pawns. One is not always enthused about it, you know'.  
  
Cassandra released the staff - but before she did that, her hand brushed against Alexius'. Her fingertips were light against his chapped, frostbitten knuckles. A fleeting, butterfly-like touch. Full of silent wonderment.  
  
When she drew back and spoke again, however, it was, once more, with an air of bristly irritation.  
  
'You are talking in riddles,' she said, lips curling. The way of a Tevinter, I suppose'.  
  
Alexius twirled his staff in his grasp, striving to appear calm, languid even.  
  
'I just do not believe I am in a position to spill my soul out to you,' he said idly.  
  
'No, you are not,' Cassandra responded firmly - and it was only when he felt hurt again, just as after all her previous condemnations of him, that Alexius knew in his heart that he had been fishing for sympathy.   
  
That a part of him had been yearning for her to say, 'No, go ahead, speak your mind. Tell me why the cultists convinced you to join them'.  
  
How utterly degrading.   
  
Even Dorian, his apprentice and friend, had yelled at him to snap out of his stupor of grief over Felix and Livia, to put it past him and get on with life - how could he expect any kinder treatment from a woman fighting against... his kind? What had he been thinking she'd do - follow up that touch on his hand with a soothing hug? Patted him on the head while he sobbed out everything that had been festering within him for the endless months, years of trudging through a discoloured, crumbling world, his heart numbed by pain, with his marital bed cold and empty on Livia’s side and his Felix tittering on the precarious threshold between life and death?   
  
Now, if anything was cheesy, that was.   
  
Leliana was going to scoop up the dirt on him and his family soon enough, during that interrogation she’d promised. He was going to disclose his motivations to join the Elder One – though not as a ploy to make Leliana more lenient (from the looks of her, he doubted the woman had a shred of maternal instinct), but as a prelude for begging her to let him combine his duties as Rift-sealer with researching the Blight.   
  
And Cassandra would likely be there too – but she would offer no hugs. It was folly to think anyone would offer one. Folly to as much as want one.  
  
'You still played a part in opening the Breach,' Cassandra went on, speaking in time with her gait, as she shook off the last shreds of her pensive state, and marched off across the ice and up the lake's opposite bank, spurring Alexius on with an occasional glare.  
  
'In... taking the Most Holy from us! Regardless of personal excuses'.  
  
'Fair enough,' Alexius panted in agreement, straining to catch up. 'Still, the truth is... The more I look at it, the more of my actions I wish to take back. Hate me for what has already come to pass, if you will - but I have my mind set on doing what is right. This... This time around'.  
  
Cheesy again - and Cassandra did not seem too impressed. But, shut him down as she did at every turn, he had not stopped pondering the questions that were flooding his mind in a new overpowering wave.  
  
What if he did have the power to heal the heavens? To find a way to save Felix that would not result in his dear boy hating him? To show the Elder One what he had whispered to himself on occasion, but had been too afraid to dwell on... That this brave new world of his did not have to dawn amid screams and smoke.  
  
Perhaps, if he had never gotten the Mark, and had gone on serving the Venatori, he would have come to rejoice in the sight of primordial chaos brewing in a realm with a tattered Veil. Perhaps he would have lost all compassion for the victims of hungry demons, and walked coldly past the scarred, scorched battlefields, not trying to halt the destruction with his magic. Perhaps he would have switched roles with Cassandra: him a jailor, her a prisoner thrashing in her chains in furious desperation - and gloated at her plight like that flaming fiend over the melting lake. Perhaps he would have bathed in blood, as she had said all Tevinter did, and stooped to the darkest, most gorey rituals to prolong his son's life, only snuffing out the last glimmer of his love in the process. Perhaps - but his little somersault in time had saved him from that.  
  
Racing through the snow in Cassandra's shadow, towards the sounds of fighting just beyond the curve of the snowy hill, Alexius suddenly remembered what he had said to Fiona, in that other timeline where his villainy almost consumed him.  
  
'It could only have been by divine providence that I arrived when I did,' he had drawled, smirking, so very full of himself. He had known that it was a lie, of course. There had been no divine providence; just Stage One of a carefully weighed and calculated plan that had gone off without a hitch. Stage Two, however, had gone up in shambles. And who was to say whose hand had mixed up all his cards?  
  
Of course, he had never truly believed that an Alamarri mage that had led a slave rebellion all those years ago - no matter how valiant - had truly been anointed by the Maker. If there even was a Maker (a question that Alexius personally preferred to be left alone, while concerning himself with more immediate, earthly matters).  
  
And, truly, if the ability to steal from the Elder One had been sanctioned by some heavenly entity, she... it... should have picked Trevelyan for the second time around as well. To continue the trend of heroic young women saving the world. A confused old Tevinter was the most nonsensical pick for the role of a new Andraste. He had not even made a good Hessarian.  
  
But on the other hand... This turn in his fate had been so steep, so unexpected, so - so flabbergasting... And at the same time, so inspiring, so tantalizing, with its promise that he now could make something of himself, something bigger and better than a Venatori minion. Maybe, in a way, it was providence after all.


End file.
